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Conservative War on Education

jhmd2000 said:
The point of the link is that family structure---something largely within your control, as a would-be parent---is a better predictor of your child's success than any other factor, including the much-discussed issue of race.

That's supposed to be good news, in a society which can never stop lashing itself about the face and neck on the issue of race. Take the W, right?
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Fine. And the point of my posts is that this good news is completely beside the point of this thread.
 
Deacon923 said:
Fine. And the point of my posts is that this good news is completely beside the point of this thread.
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Right. I tend to disagree with the premise that my party is conducting a war on education, since we're the ones launching reform initiative after reform initiative, which the other party shoots down to protect the status quo, including a loyal voting bloc of public employees and the expense of children and families.

If you really care about education of children---and I believe that you do---maybe quit heaping blame on your political opponents and look at what the study says threatens student achievement? Just a thought.
 
jhmd2000 said:
Moar than that, to hear it told. They hate children so much they want bad teachers measured, identified and removed from the system. Savages.
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In North Carolina, it would appear that they also want to drive all the best teachers to find work in other states, and eliminate long-standing programs known to produce excellent teachers. Meanwhile, the "bad teachers" who have been "measured, identified and removed" have been very, very few. NC has been under 100% Republican control for 4 years, and there are no teacher's unions in North Carolina to slow down their grand plans. Please tell me again how it is that North Carolina Republicans are upgrading the teaching profession in this state?
 
jhmd2000 said:
Right. I tend to disagree with the premise that my party is conducting a war on education, since we're the ones launching reform initiative after reform initiative, which the other party shoots down to protect the status quo, including a loyal voting bloc of public employees and the expense of children and families.

If you really care about education of children---and I believe that you do---maybe quit heaping blame on your political opponents and look at what the study says threatens student achievement? Just a thought.
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If you want to cloak yourself in the mantle of Republican education reform, go ahead. I don't think there's a track record there you would be proud of. The Louisiana higher education system is nearly bankrupt due to budget cuts. Kansas can barely keep its schools open at all. The situation in North Carolina has been well-chronicled on these boards. Surely if these Herculean efforts were leading to better outcomes for poor kids, you would have evidence to show for it?

Republican education "reform initiatives", as far as I can tell, are one huge exercise in political retribution and throwing babies out with bathwater. It is telling that you come on this thread not to offer any evidence of Republican reform successes, but to point out that having two parents is a key factor in success - something nobody disputes, and (again) something that school reform efforts - Republican or otherwise - in no way impact.
 
jhmd2000 said:
Right. I tend to disagree with the premise that my party is conducting a war on education, since we're the ones launching reform initiative after reform initiative, which the other party shoots down to protect the status quo, including a loyal voting bloc of public employees and the expense of children and families.

If you really care about education of children---and I believe that you do---maybe quit heaping blame on your political opponents and look at what the study says threatens student achievement? Just a thought.
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Filling up the school calendar with standardized testing is really getting the job done!
 
Deacon923 said:
If you want to cloak yourself in the mantle of Republican education reform, go ahead. I don't think there's a track record there you would be proud of. The Louisiana higher education system is nearly bankrupt due to budget cuts. Kansas can barely keep its schools open at all. The situation in North Carolina has been well-chronicled on these boards. Surely if these Herculean efforts were leading to better outcomes for poor kids, you would have evidence to show for it?

Republican education "reform initiatives", as far as I can tell, are one huge exercise in political retribution and throwing babies out with bathwater. It is telling that you come on this thread not to offer any evidence of Republican reform successes, but to point out that having two parents is a key factor in success - something nobody disputes, and (again) something that school reform efforts - Republican or otherwise - in no way impact.
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Would you prefer the Detroit model?
 
What's all this talk about Detroit? Has this been posted? Detroit has more charters and choice that almost any city in the country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/u...ore-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html

Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.


While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.


Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.


“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city.”


The city has emerged almost miraculously fast from the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Downtown Detroit hums with development — a maze of detours around construction sites with luxury apartments, a new Nike store along a stretch of prime but empty storefronts. Even where blight resumes a few blocks out, farm-to-table restaurants and modern design stores sprout hopefully. Last year, the city had its smallest population decline since the 1950s.


But the city’s residents — many of them stranded here after whites and middle-class blacks fled in waves — will not share in any renaissance as long as only 10 percent of rising high school seniors score “college ready” on reading tests.
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For-profit companies seized on the opportunity; they now operate about 80 percent of charters in Michigan, far more than in any other state. The companies and those who grant the charters became major lobbying forces for unfettered growth of the schools, as did some of the state’s biggest Republican donors.


Sometimes, they were one and the same, as with J. C. Huizenga, a Grand Rapids entrepreneur who founded Michigan’s largest charter school operator, the for-profit National Heritage Academies. Two of the biggest players in Michigan politics, Betsy and Dick DeVos — she the former head of the state Republican Party, he the heir to the Amway fortune and a 2006 candidate for governor — established the Great Lakes Education Project, which became the state’s most pugnacious protector of the charter school prerogative.


Even as Michigan and Detroit continued to hemorrhage residents, the number of schools grew. The state has nearly 220,000 fewer students than it did in 2003, but more than 100 new charter schools.


As elsewhere across the country, charters concentrated in urban areas, particularly Detroit, where the public schools had been put under state control in 1999. In 2009, it was found to be the lowest-performing urban school district on national tests.


Operators were lining up to get into the city, and in 2011, after a conservative wave returned the governor’s office and the Legislature to Republican control for the first time in eight years, the Legislature abolished a cap that had limited the number of charter schools that universities could create to 150.
Some charter school backers pushed for a so-called smart cap that would allow only successful charters to expand. But they could not agree on what success should look like, and ultimately settled for assurances from lawmakers that they could add quality controls after the cap was lifted
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In fact, the law repealed a longstanding requirement that the State Department of Education issue yearly reports monitoring charter school performance.


At the same time, the law included a provision that seemed to benefit Mr. Huizenga, whose company profits from buying buildings and renting them back to the charters it operates. Earlier that year he had lost a tax appeal in which he argued that a for-profit company should not have to pay taxes on properties leased to schools. The new law granted for-profit charter companies the exemption he had sought.
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The charter school where Ana Rivera sent her two sons, Cesar Chavez Academy, added a second elementary school, even though its existing one fell below 98 percent of schools on the most recent state rankings, in 2014. The Leona Group, the Arizona-based for-profit operator that runs it, also runs some of the worst-performing schools in Detroit. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, considered the gold standard of measurement by charter school supporters across the country, found that students in the company’s schools grew less academically than students in the neighboring traditional public schools.


Ms. Rivera, herself the product of a failing Detroit public high school, knew none of that when she chose the school for her sons. “I had no idea of the education system,” she said. She presumed it was better because it was a charter; it did not get the bad press the public schools do about gangs and violence.
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By 2015, a federal review of a grant application for Michigan charter schools found an “unreasonably high” number of charters among the worst-performing 5 percent of public schools statewide. The number of charters on the list had doubled from 2010 to 2014.


“People here had so much confidence in choice and choice alone to close the achievement gap,” said Amber Arellano, the executive director of the Education Trust Midwest, which advocates higher academic standards. “Instead, we’re replicating failure.”
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Then, at a bus stop for the private school, her daughter was recruited for a charter that promised college seminars and dual enrollment at local colleges — and rewarded her for enrolling with a raffle ticket for a $50 gift card.


With all the new schools, Detroit has roughly 30,000 more seats, charter and traditional public, than it needs. The competition to get students to school on count day — the days in October and February when the head count determines how much money the state sends each school — can resemble a political campaign. Schools buy radio ads and billboards, sponsor count day pizza parties and carnivals. They plant rows of lawn signs along city streets to recruit students, only to have other schools pull those up and stake their own.
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jhmd2000 said:
Would you prefer the Detroit model?
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That's a straw man. You are the one who chose, expressly and in writing, to stand on the Republican record of education "reform". I want results, not ideology, and I'm not beholden to whatever the Democratic plank or the Detroit master plan is. What I do know is that the starving the beast approach from Kansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina isn't showing results. Last year a whole slew of Kansas school districts had to close early for lack of funds. Even good, accountable teachers can't teach students who have been sent home early due to massive budget cuts.
 
Deacon923 said:
That's a straw man. You are the one who chose, expressly and in writing, to stand on the Republican record of education "reform". I want results, not ideology, and I'm not beholden to whatever the Democratic plank or the Detroit master plan is. What I do know is that the starving the beast approach from Kansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina isn't showing results. Last year a whole slew of Kansas school districts had to close early for lack of funds. Even good, accountable teachers can't teach students who have been sent home early due to massive budget cuts.
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You want results? How do you measure those results?
 
I'm just waiting for someone to read the article I posted about charters and choice in Detroit.
 
PhDeac said:
I'm just waiting for someone to read the article I posted about charters and choice in Detroit.
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funny-skeleton-waiting-in-garden.jpg
 
Deacon923 said:
I think I hear the sounds of goal posts moving in this thread.
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Let me guess. You love dissent, you really do, but when someone doesn't say what you want to hear, you declare their dissenting point of view as a) off-topic, and if that doesn't work, b) they're moving the goalposts, or failing that, c) they're slaying a straw man, or when all else fails, d) raciost.

The conservative war on education(TM) has nothing on what Dems have done to public school systems. Just YouTube "Detroit Public Schools 60 Minutes Dan Rather" and tell me otherwise. I simply dare you to watch that film and then bitch about charter schools and school choice. To do so is to elevate the partisan loyalties (since denied) above reason and evidence.
 
jhmd2000 said:
Let me guess. You love dissent, you really do, but when someone doesn't say what you want to hear, you declare their dissenting point of view as a) off-topic, and if that doesn't work, b) they're moving the goalposts, or failing that, c) they're slaying a straw man, or when all else fails, d) raciost.

The conservative war on education(TM) has nothing on what Dems have done to public school systems. Just YouTube "Detroit Public Schools 60 Minutes Dan Rather" and tell me otherwise. I simply dare you to watch that film and then bitch about charter schools and school choice. To do so is to elevate the partisan loyalties (since denied) above reason and evidence.
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On the contrary, I engaged with your substantive posts. Instead of engaging with those posts, you went with the tried and true "if you disagree with me, you must want everywhere to be like DETROIT". Instead of playing that dog-eared old Democrats = Detroit = 923 card, why don't you try defending the conservative "reforms" you say you are so proud of? Surely you must have some data that shows student performance improvement in R-controlled, non-unionized Louisiana*, Kansas, and North Carolina? What with all that choice and reform and budget cutting and all?* Turns out that Detroit is all about choice too, they just forgot about the accountability piece I guess.

*Hint: you can find some promising results in New Orleans if you try. Too bad their higher education system only has enough money for football teams and pet tigers.


ETA: For the record, I agreed with your "dissenting opinion" that two-parent households are excellent predictors of success. You and I shall proceed, arm-in-arm, in steadfast opposition to all the haters that deny our shared dissenting opinion that two parent households are the best way to raise children. I shall dissent to the bitter end with you on this one, friend, come what may!
 
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